Upton Sinclair's The Jungle [posted by Troy]
Chris Bachelder in this week's Mother Jones writes a review of Upton Sinclair's classic book, The Jungle, which turns 100 years old. Bachelder ends the piece with a bit a sadness that American literature has moved away from showing us the big picture problems of our society and has become psycho-analytical character studies where all "truth" is relative, and no reader wants to learn large-scale lessons. Sinclair himself was saddned that this book led to reform in the quality of meat in the US and not to reform of working conditions. Here is a quote from Bachelder's article: Although The Jungle is still in print and continues to be assigned for the muckraking mini- unit in American History, it has not aged well as a novel. Grudgingly called a “minor masterpiece” at midcentury by critic Howard Mumford Jones, The Jungle today is certainly regarded as less than that, more likely to be mentioned alongside Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Bad but Important) than The Grapes of Wrath (Political but Good). While writers like Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal took at least a passing and sympathetic interest in Sinclair’s work, now it is nearly impossible to imagine an emergent American novelist for whom The Jungle is an influential or cherished book. The easiest explanation is aesthetic: The Jungle just isn’t artful... Later in his career, Sinclair knew himself well enough as an artist to tell the critic Van Wyck Brooks that “some novelists I know collect their material with a microscope, and I collect mine with a telescope.” E.L. Doctorow once said that contemporary American writers are more technically proficient and far less socially or politically motivated than previous generations of writers (many of whom began as journalists). Readers of contemporary literary fiction have grown accustomed to the novel’s microscopic power to render, often beautifully, the small moments of a character’s life. Conversely, we’ve grown skeptical of the novel’s telescopic function to bring large, distant abstractions into focus. We’re wary of the big picture. And if the accurate depiction or explanation of the world outside our minds is not a part of our conception of Good Literature, we will fail to recognize the power of The Jungle.
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